“The heroic books, even if printed in the character of our mother tongue, will always be in a language dead to degenerate times; and we must laboriously seek the meaning of each word and line, conjecturing a larger sense than common use permits out of what wisdom and valor and generosity we have.” -- Henry David Thoreau

About Me

Editor for publishing company by day; skald in the Hall of Fire by night; and member of the S.H.I.E.L.D.W.A.L.L.
Essayist and reviewer for numerous web and print-based fantasy publications, including The Cimmerian, Black Gate, Mythprint, REH: Two-Gun Raconteur, The Dark Man, and SFFaudio.com.

Saturday, February 16, 2013

Conan Meets the
Academy: Multidisciplinary Essays on the Enduring Barbarian (McFarland and
Company, Inc., Publishers, 2013) offers a broad selection of essays on Conan,
but not just the Conan of Robert E. Howard’s stories. It covers Conan in all his
various forms, from the original Weird
Tales barbarian, to the hulking brute of the Schwarzenegger film, to the
various computer generated avatars in the Age of Conan computer game. In this
way it differs greatly from its predecessors The Dark Barbarian and The Barbaric
Triumph, which reserve their analysis for Howard and Howard’s stories
alone.

This book will, I suspect, set many Howard fans’ teeth on
edge. It opens with an unapologetic defense of the L. Sprague de Camp/Lin
Carter-edited Lancer/Ace Conan paperbacks, positing that without these books
Conan and Robert E. Howard would be all but forgotten today. Writes editor
Jonas Prida, “The problem of de Camp’s decision to re-order the chronology and
list himself on Tales of Conan’s
cover as one of the authors has been alluded to, but what must also be admitted
is that without the controlling hand of de Camp, both Conan and Howard may have
gone the way of Kull, relegated to footnote status in investigations into
fellow Weird Tales’ contributor H.P.
Lovecraft.” Now I personally have no issue with placing the DeCamp/Carter
pastiches, or even the Conan films and videogames, under the academic
microscope; far from it, I think it’s an interesting and worthy exercise. However
Prida seems to think that the root of De Camp-ian resentment is purists
defending the Conan canon, but I disagree: What draws the ire of many Howard
fans is De Camp’s often mean-spirited assessment of Howard the man in these
books’ introductions and elsewhere.

In addition, Conan
Meets the Academy: Multidisciplinary Essays on the Enduring Barbarian
trumpets itself as a trailblazer in what Prida describes as a limited field of
traditional literary analysis (“The first scholarly investigation of Conan,”
according to a blurb on the back cover). Though it tips a cap to Mark Finn’s Blood and Thunder and Glenn Lord’s The
Last Celt, Prida has apparently either not heard of The Dark Barbarian and The
Barbaric Triumph or does not consider them "scholarly," as these fail to garner a mention in
the preface.

"Wonder had gone away, and he had forgotten that all life is only a set of pictures in the brain, among which there is no difference betwixt those born of real things and those born of inward dreamings, and no cause to value the one above the other."